How to Use Tailwind to Build Your Traffic

Not only is it a great place to learn new blogging tips and find office space inspiration, but it’s also a great place to share your content with millions of people.

If you’re not already using Pinterest for your blog, open up my Pinterest Strategy Guide in a new tab. It’s where I go over the basics of setting up a business account, creating an irresistible profile and designing your own pins.

But today, I’m talking about the secret sauce to Pinterest.

The one little tool that is going to help you reach millions of eyes on Pinterest and grow your blog traffic while you’re asleep.

It’s called Tailwind. And it’s about to become your new best friend.

This post contains affiliate links, which means if you make a purchase through one of the links, I may receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. For more information, please read my disclaimer.

What is Tailwind?

Tailwind is a scheduling tool for Pinterest. It allows you to bulk schedule your pins for days, or even weeks, in advance.

Here are some of the other things you can use Tailwind for:

Expanding your reach on Pinterest

Increasing the amount of times your pins are shared

Creating the perfect pinning schedule

Analyzing your Pinterest analytics

Plus, Tailwind is an approved Pinterest partner! Which means that you don’t have to worry about breaking any of Pinterest’s rules or jeopardizing your account when using Tailwind.

It’s also important to note that while you can start scheduling your pins right away with Tailwind, you might not see a jump in traffic immediately. With the Pinterest algorithm, it can take a while for your pins to start showing up in search results and home pages. You should also pay close attention to your Tailwind analytics to tweak your strategy whenever necessary.

Claim Your Tailwind Free Trial

Before we go any further, you should probably get set up with Tailwind. So, click on this link to get a Tailwind free trial! The trial will allow you to schedule up to 100 pins for free. If you end up loving Tailwind (which I think you will), then you can purchase a Tailwind plan. It’s $10 a month and that gives you access to unlimited pinning.

Download the Tailwind Browser Extension

After creating your account, you’ll end up on the Tailwind dashboard.

Start by installing the Tailwind browser extension.

This handy little feature will allow you to seamlessly schedule pins from any website – including your blog and your actual Pinterest boards. It’s free to download and it’s going to make your #pingame a whole lot easier!

You can find the download button under any of the “Publish” tools on your dashboard in the left-hand menu, like “Drafts” or “Scheduled Pins”. It will be located near the top.

Create Board Lists

One of the things that makes Tailwind so great are “Board Lists”. These enable you to schedule pins to multiple boards with just one click.

To access your board lists, hover over the megaphone icon in the left hand side menu and click on “Board Lists”. From here, you can start building board lists by clicking “Add a List” and then typing in the names of boards you want to group together.

Come up with a board list system that works for you! I like to list my boards by topics (a list for blogging tips, another for travel etc.), group size (helps to avoid duplicate pinning) and group rules (to keep track of boards with strict rules). I include my own Pinterest boards in my Tailwind board lists as well as all of the group boards that I’m apart of.

Set Up Your Smart Schedule

In the left hand menu, right above “Board Lists” is another awesome Tailwind feature: your schedule.

It allows you to customize the times you want Tailwind to automatically publish your pins. Tailwind will generate a totally custom smart schedule for you,which is based on the times when your audience is most active. It’s optimized to get you the best engagement on all of your pins.

Let’s get started. Here’s what you need to do:

Click on the “Generate New Smart Schedule” button.

Enter in the amount of times that you want Tailwind to pin each day.

View your smart schedule. Click on any green time-slot to adjust the time or delete it entirely. Add more time-slots by clicking the “Add Time Slot” button.

You can load more of Tailwind’s recommended times by clicking on the time-slots with the dotted green line. Also, try to refresh your smart schedule periodically! Your audience and highest engagement times will change frequently.

How many times should you pin per day?

I recommend pinning between 30 and 60 times per day. But, the amount you pin varies depending on how many pins you have to share and how many boards you’re apart of. And while 50 pins might seem a bit extreme, it’s important to know that this includes a mix of your own content and the content that you share or repin from other people.

In fact, you should try to share the content of others more often than your own. It’s known to increase your Pinterest engagement. And if you’re constantly sharing valuable content, your audience will thank you!

Schedule Your Pins

Thanks to the handy browser extension I mentioned earlier, this part is going to be a breeze. You can use the exact same process to pin any images that you find online, including directly from your Pinterest boards and blog posts.

Here is how you can get started:

Head to one of your Pinterest boards or find an image online that you want to share.

Click the Tailwind extension in your browser. If you’re on Pinterest, it should automatically pop up when you hover over a pin.

Choose the image that you want to add to your schedule. You can also select multiple images, which is a huge time-saver! *

Click “Go Schedule” and select the board lists or boards where you want to share the image. You can also add the pin to any relevant Tailwind Tribes, which we’ll talk about in a minute.

Click “Add to Queue Now”.

Optional: Set a time interval. You can choose anywhere between 10 minutes and 90 days. This is extremely useful when pinning to group boards that have a cap on how many times you can post per day. It also ensures that the same pin won’t end up being pinned too many times in a row.

Now, your pins have been added to your schedule and will be posted on Pinterest automatically according to your time-slots. To keep an eye on your scheduled pins, head to your Tailwind dashboard and click on “Scheduled Pins” in the left menu. You can change the order of your pins by drag and drop or by simply clicking the “Shuffle Queue” on the top right-hand side.

Tailwind Tribes

This is one of the features that makes Tailwind such a unique and valuable tool! Tribes provide you with the opportunity to:

Connect with other bloggers.

Gain access to relevant and high-quality content for you to share.

Share your posts and get them seen by a lot of people.

To start using Tailwind Tribes, locate it in the left-side menu and click on the “Find a Tribe” button. Search for any keywords related to your niche to bring up a list of relevant tribes. If you’re interested in joining more general boards, just type in “blogging” or something similar.

Once you’re in, you’ll gain access to the dashboard for each individual tribe. From here, you can the tribe overview, your performance, other tribe members and of course, all of the recent content shared with the tribe.

If you find something that you want to schedule to your Tailwind, simply type in a board list or name and hit the “Add to Queue” button. Other tribe members will be able to see if you shared their content, so spread the love!

When you want to share your own content with your tribe, follow the same Schedule Your Pin steps listed above.

View Your Analytics & Results

Here are some of the different types of analytics you can access and where to find them on Tailwind:

1. The Weekly Summary

Your weekly summary gives you an overview of your pinning performance over the last 7 days. It tracks the amount of followers, pins and repins you’ve received in comparison to the previous week. It will also show a few of your most repinned boards.

You can access your weekly summary at the top of the left-hand menu. Tailwind will also send you an email each week that includes your personal summary. It’s very handy!

2. Monitor Your Domain

This section is also accessible through the left-hand menu. It will provide you with three types of analytics:

Insights regarding pin activity from your domain.

Latest pins from your domain and a word cloud related to your content.

Referral traffic information.

3. Track Your Brand Page

There are two different tabs in this section.

The first, “Profile Performance” will provide you with your weekly summary, daily follower growth chart, engagement rate, engagement score and your virality score. According to Tailiwnd, your virality score is the total repins divided by total pins. It gives you an indication as to how many pins are being repinned across your profile.

And quite possibly one of the best Tailwind analytics can be found in the “Board Insights” tab. This provides with an in-depth look at each of your board’s performance. Including both personal and group boards.

You can sort your boards by total number of pins, followers, repins, it’s virality score and engagement score. Allowing you to easily determine which are your best performing boards and which ones you need to re-strategize.

4. Optimize Content

A few of the tabs under this section are only accessible to people who have a Tailwind Enterprise account. I am not one of those people and therefore, I can only comment on the Pin Inspector tool, which is accessible to regular accounts.

The Pin Inspector allows you to sort through all of your past pins and determine which ones have the highest amount of repins and comments. You can filter your results by date, category, board and domain.

If you’re anything like me and like to make multiple pins for your blog posts, this a great way to split test them and find out which ones perform better!

Learn More

I hope this post gave you a clear understanding of how to use Tailwind to build you traffic

These are the same strategies that I currently use with my own blog. I’ve been using Tailwind consistently for about 6 months and Pinterest now accounts for over 60% of my traffic.

Remember, results won’t happen overnight. Pay close attention to your Pinterest and Tailwind analytics, so that you can tweak your strategy when necessary. If you consistently have low engagement on your pins, try changing up the design or adding more relevant keywords and hashtags to the description.

As I mentioned earlier, you can try Tailwind for free using my referral link. The trial includes 100 pins, which gives you plenty of time to decide if it’s for you. As of February 2018, Tailwind costs $10 per month (paid upfront, with unlimited pinning) or $16 per month (paid monthly, 400 pin maximum).

I’ve been using Tailwind for a couple months now, and it definitely hasn’t “exploded” my traffic, even with all of these steps! It has increased it but I was a little upset to discover you can now only join 5 tribes for the normal subscription fee.

I’ve had Tailwind for about a month now, and I’m not actually that impressed yet… I already do a lot of pinning on my own every day, and plan my pins the same way I plan my instagram and facebook posts. The instagram feature through tailwind has been my favorite part so far. I’m going to try some of these tips and see if things change. Thanks!

roamy

Hi there
Thanks so much for explaining how Tailwind works, I have seen people promote Tailwind in social media but nothing was explained how it really works.Will now signup and try out the 100 free pins,as I`m new to Pinterest, anything that can make things easy is welcome.

Welcome

I'm Maya, a digital nomad turned travel agent who loves inspiring others to live life on their own terms. This blog is where I share my hard won knowledge of working online, blogging & travelling the world. Thanks for visiting!